Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “The cloth, he thought, has been eaten away by sulfuric acid without catching fore. What caused that? And with that, he took the rag of the fabric and steeped it in the sulfuric acid. To begin with he obtained a sticky substance, soluble in water. He saturated it with chalk, submitted it to evaporation and then obtained a sugary gum analogous to gum Arabic. Twenty-one grams of dry fabric gave him twenty-six grams of that gum, free of sulfuric acid—which is to say, more gum than cloth.

  “If, instead of saturating the mucilaginous solution of wood, straw or cloth in sulfuric acid with chalk, one dilutes it with several times its own weight of water and boils it for ten hours or so, one can then ensure that all the gummy substance is converted into sugar; it’s then only a matter of separating the sugar from the acid and neutralizing the latter with chalk. The liquid, filtered and evaporated, has the consistence of syrup, and after twenty-four hours it all solidifies into a single mass of passably pure sugar.

  “After that, one presses it forcefully in linen, and makes it crystallizes a second time. It only becomes dazzling white, however, after being treated with animal charcoal.”

  “And the cream from coal?”

  “There’s everything in coal, even essences for making confectionery. When one distils coal, one obtains three substances: one solid, coke; one liquid, tar; and one gaseous, carbonated hydrogen. One can also harvest solutions from which one can extract ammonia in abundance and at low cost, which in general use in industry, and was bought from Orient very expensively at the end of the last century, when it was supposedly only obtainable from camel-dung.84

  “You know how coke and hydrogen are employed, in lighting and hating. As for the tar, as it comes out of the retort its employment is less immediate. People tried to substitute it for asphalt in road-building, but it lacked the solidity and resistance; feet sink into its black layers, almost as they do today in mud except that they don’t come out so easily. To take advantage of coal-tar, it’s therefore necessary to distil it further.

  “First chemistry, and then industry, obtained from that hitherto-useless substance liquids possessing infinitely various densities and properties, from a light oil scarcely weighing as much as alcohol to napthalene, a heavy, nacreous solid that is often efficacious in treating skin diseases.

  “The hydrocarbons produced by the distillation of coal-tar form another family, that of gazogenes. Mixed with alcohol, gazogenes replace fuel oil, up to a point; they’re known by the name of liquid gas. Almost uniquely, at present, they possess the property of dissolving rubber; note, in passing, that they cause the noxious odor exhaled by garments coated in that substance. Finally, submitted to certain reactions, further distilled, and combined with ether, they become essence with delightful perfumes, which Parisian confectionery is the first in the world to employ to give bonbons flavors of strawberry and pineapple. Rum and cognac often acquire their bouquet from a few drops of one of these essences. One also obtains from coal-tar a tinctural substance analogous to one of the precious colors that is extracted from madder.

  “Various properties of coal products, observed and studied, will doubtless not be long delayed in giving further progress to industry. Tanneries, among others, will one day be able to obtain results in a matter of hours that presently require months of hard work. The principle on which these future methods rests exists in theory, but its application still remains insufficient. One finds oneself blocked by one of those invincible obstacles that hazard often ends up removing when human genius, thinking itself vanquished, gives up.

  “But let’s get back to the bonbons.

  “Sugary confections with the flavor of apple, pear, quince, melon and many others, the English sweets that have become popular and are sold by grocers, owe their aroma to combinations of butyric ether with vinegar, valerianic acid or coccinic acid, extracted from coconuts. Butyric ether is itself merely a compound produced from butyric acid. Now, that acid is obtained by the distillation of decomposing organic matter, such as cheese or meat. Let us ad, to reassure the disgusted, that one can also prepare it by the metamorphosis that sugar, starch and other analogous substances undergo on contact with nitrogenated substances capable of acting as fermenting agents.

  “Let’s now come to the ice made in an incandescent furnace. Nothing is simpler. Into a red-hot platinum capsule one pours a few grams of anhydrous—which is to say, water-free—sulfuric acid. That acid, which melts at ten degrees below zero, passes into the spheroidal state and maintains itself at a temperature of eleven degrees. If one projects water on to the spheroid formed by the sulfuric acid, the water, put in contact with a body at such a low temperature, freezes instantly, as you have seen.”

  “What is this spheroidal state, then?”

  “When you project a liquid on to an incandescent surface, the liquid, no matter from what height it falls, doesn’t wet that surface—which is to say that it doesn’t come into contact with it, does not touch it. It takes on a globular form and remains at a constant temperature, inferior to its boiling point, no matter how high the surrounding temperature is.”

  “Thank God, you’re not a sorcerer but a scientist,” said the Baron. “I prefer that. And the famous light that competes with the sun, which will soon allow us to see clearly at midnight?”

  “You’ve seen it during our subterranean excursion. A simple apparatus produces it with the aid of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, which illuminate over a simple piece of chalk.”

  “Come on, my girl, get ready to leave; I’m in all the more haste to set out for home and see this splendid light now that midnight’s about to chime, and all this excitement has made me singularly weary.”

  “Soon, Baron,” said Fritz, gallantly placing Notburga’s mantle over the young woman’s shoulders, “I hope you’ll no longer have to leave the old castle when you feel tired.”

  “And when will that be, councilor?”

  “When, my dear Baron? When you’re my father-in-law. In a month!”

  This time, Notburga nearly fainted completely. Fritz caught her in his arms, and after she had recovered her senses, he said: “Don’t you know that I’ve been in love with you for a long time, Fraulein Notburga? Don’t you know that I came to take over the ruins of the old castle in order to be close to you?”

  “I’ve realized that, Herr Fritz,” she replied, letting her hand fall into the young man’s.

  “I see that nothing remains but for me to say amen,” the Baron concluded. “I’m happy for her to become your wife my friend, but I warn you that I don’t intended to be parted from my daughter, and you’ll have to give me accommodation in the castle.”

  “You shall have the finest apartment,” the councilor replied. “Fraulein Notburga, lean on my arm and permit me to escort you back to your father’s house, until the same of can gather all three of us together.”

  They set off on the road to the little house, and when they arrived at the door, the Baron said: “You haven’t kept your word, Fritz. I haven’t seen the slightest ray of your famous lighting, and but for the kindness of the moon, I might have put my foot in a rut.”

  Fritz and Notburga must have been saying very interesting things to one another, because neither of them heard a word of the Baron’s ironic reproach.

  THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF PARIS

  Four thousand years ago, immense forests covered the region occupied today by the city of Paris and the surrounding districts of Bondy, Ville-d’Avray, Marly, Bellevue, Meudon and Chaville.

  In the epoch in which my story begins, those forests, all the more sinister in their appearance because winter had stripped them of their leaves, were composed primarily of oak-trees, elm-trees, ash-trees, willows, pines and firs, whose gigantic trunks, sometimes sturdy and powerful, sometimes thinned by the years, rose up into the sky or strewed the ground with their debris in the midst of an inextricable mass of bushes, brambles and wild plants. To cap it all, snow extended its white shroud everywhere.

  As for the river that trav
ersed those woods, a chill of seven or eight degrees consolidated its surface and added further, by virtue of its immobility, to the lugubrious aspect of the country.

  Only bears, lions, tigers, hyenas, badgers, oxen, aurochs, sheep, reindeer, fallow deer, antelopes, wild dogs, wolves, wild boar, horses, hares and rabbits troubled the silence that reigned everywhere. Some were fleeing before bands of enemies; others were pursuing or devouring their victims; above them, birds of prey circled in the air, in order to take their part in the carnage.

  The semi-darkness that still enveloped nature gradually dissipated, and the sun was beginning to show on the horizon when a troop of about a hundred humans appeared on the bank of the Seine, facing the island that now bear the name of the Île de la Cité.

  The humans had been following the course of the river for more than a month; they stopped in response to an order given by an old man who seemed to be their chief.

  While the women and children collected dead branches and built a pyre—which they lit by vigorously rubbing a piece of soft wood in a hole in a hollow piece of hard wood, which each of them carried suspended around the neck by a cord of animal-hide—the old man gathered his companions around him and addressed a few words to them in a rude and guttural language.

  That council of humans, most of whom were of small stature, to be sure, but robust and thickset, clad in crudely tanned bearskins or reindeer pelts, was a strange spectacle, although it did not lack a certain savage majesty. Their reddish hair fell over their shoulders in its full length; their beards covered their chests; in their hands they held either clubs, lassos made of large punctured stones attached with long leather thongs, spears with flint heads embedded in cleft sticks, or axes whose stone heads were fixed into a bone or an antler with the aid of leather strips, applied moist and then dried in the sun, like those the indigenes still fabricate in certain parts of North America.

  The women, similarly clad in hides, but more supple ones, similarly allowed their gilded hair to fall over their shoulders. Necklaces of petrified marine sponges and the teeth of wolves or oxen, arranged with an esthetic sensibility of sorts, were reminiscent of the ornaments still found today among the daughters of Africa, Polynesia and the New World. They wore crude fur shoes tied around their slender legs, and their feet were remarkably small. Finally, the melancholy gaze of their big blue eyes tempered the savage character given to their symmetrical oval faces by suntan, privation and fatigue.

  The chief of the tribe, handing a flint ax embedded in a bull’s horn to one of the men who were surrounding him, turned to the women and gave them orders; they rose to their feet respectfully to listen to them, and immediately hastened to carry them out. In a few minutes, they quit the fire around which they had previously been grouped, and while some of them placed their children on their shoulders, others grouped together either to carry canoes made of tree-barks sewn together or crudely hollowed out from a single tree-trunk, or large baskets woven with willow-branches, which contained frozen meat, acorns and variously-formed utensils in wood or stone.

  They immediately set out to cross the river over the ice. The men marched at the head, the women and children came after them; finally, a few warriors, spears in hand, formed a rear-guard.

  Having arrived on the Île de la Cité, the women stopped and set up a sort of camp there, while their menfolk explored the surroundings. They soon came back to announce to their leader that they had found a grotto, but that it served as a den for wolves or bears, to judge by the bones strewn around outside. Immediately, they picked up their weapons; tree branches were ignited, and the assault on the grotto began.

  Some threw brands through a narrow hole that opened almost at ground level, while other climbed up above the cavern to see whether there might be a crack that would permit them to continue the attack from that direction. They did not take long to discover a broad fissure, through which they also threw firebrands.

  Scarcely had the double siege begun than howls emerged from the lair, and a gigantic bear showed its enormous head through the basal opening, which only permitted it to emerge by crawling. A heavy stone, launched by one of the assailants, struck its forehead, and before it could retreat, wounded and bloody, twenty spears pierced it and rendered it incapable of further fight. With the aid of one of the lassos mentioned above, the roaring animal was hauled out of the grotto and they finished killing it.

  Its female and four cubs, chased from their refuge by the fire, were subjected to the same fate.

  The victory won, cries of triumph summoned the women; the latter carried the six cadavers to the fire that had been lit when they installed themselves on the island, and set about butchering them with as much skill as promptitude, aided by flint knives of all sizes. Some removed the skins and others detached the quarters of meat, while their companions broke the bones and took them to the warriors in order that they could eat the marrow while it was still warm.

  In the meantime, the most succulent parts of the bears were pierced with sticks and roasted in the fire, while the remainder was attached to neighboring trees in order that the frost might harden and conserve it.

  While all that was done, the flames, alimented by further bundles of wood, continued to crackle inside the cavern and send forth long sprays of sparks and black columns of smoke through the crack open at its summit; after which the formidable fire was allowed to go out.

  Later, one of the warriors tried several times, without success, to get inside the cave; scarcely had he introduced his head through the narrow opening that served as a passage than he backed out again, half-suffocated by the smoke.

  In the meantime, it was beginning to get dark and they had to make the arrangements necessary for camping in the open. They placed the boats on stakes planted in the ground, surrounded them with branches that were covered with the skins of the bears, still fresh, and the warriors crouched down with their lances beside them near these improvised huts, in which the women and children huddled.

  These preparations terminated, night fell: a winter night with its profound darkness, the roaring of the wind and biting cold. Soon, the cries of ferocious beasts attracted by the odor of fresh pelts began to rise up in all directions; kept at a distance by the fires lit around the little camp, they testified to their disappointment with sinister clamors. The wild dogs, whose eyes could be seen gleaming in the shadows, uttered lugubrious baying sounds, such as their domesticated descendants sometimes utter in our countryside, which cause peasants to make the sign of the cross when they hear them—because it is, they say, an omen of death. The wolves howled, the hyenas sobbed, the lions roared, and the foxes yapped.

  Sometimes, a tiger, more cunning, crept silently to the edge of the camp and sought by sliding its paws through the branches to seize a sleeping child. Then the mothers uttered screams of fear, and the warriors on watch seized their weapons and came to drive the redoubtable enemy away. If an injured tiger fled, more than one of its adversaries also fell to the icy ground, its torso labored by powerful thrusts of claws or a limb broken by formidable jaws.

  The women, doubtless familiar with such scenes, hastened to attend to the wounded, and in accordance with the others give by one of them, who, although still young, exercised an absolute authority; they surrounded the wounds with strips of fresh leather or covered them with clay softened with warm water.

  Finally, day began to dawn. The ferocious beats gradually retreated into the depths of the forest, and silence was reestablished around the camp.

  As soon as the sun appeared over the horizon through the black clouds that enveloped the sky, the old man and his warriors gathered together, prostrated themselves before the star and addressed a long prayer to it. Then they got up again and, at a sign from their chief, headed for the cavern. A little smoke was still emerging from the upper opening, but even so, one of the warriors was able to get inside; a few minutes later, he came out again, and the old man and his companions entered in their turn.

  The grotto
, illuminated by torches made from resinous tree branches, resembled the majority of the abandoned quarries that one discovers, so to speak, at every step in the environs of Paris and in Paris itself. It owed its formation to one of those collapses so frequent in quaternary terrains, produced by the retreat of the waters. Elevated nearly four or five meters, and about sixty meters in circumference, it only presented a few cracks in places, of varying depth. There were no traces indicative of damp on its gray walls, now almost entirely blacked by the smoke of the fire lit inside the previous day.

  Before taking possession of the primitive dwelling, the old man gave the order not to broaden but, on the contrary, to elongate the fissure that opened at the summit of the grotto.

  Immediately, they set to work, and with the aid of large stones collected from the bank of the Seine, and powerful tools of half-carved flint, they did not take long to bring that work to a successful conclusion. In spite of the crudity of the instruments of which they made use, each of the humans employed in such rude work showed the skill that the hand acquires with practice, no matter how imperfect the tools it employs might be.

  As the fissure grew, other warriors arranged stones across its width, which, without intercepting air and light, would conceal the mysterious opening from an enemy gaze.

  Those precautions taken, the women crawled into the cavern. Some of them took away the plants and branches with which the bears had made a den for their cubs, brought a considerable quantity of dried wood, chosen preferentially from among resinous species, and lit a big fire in the middle of the cave, directly underneath the fissure in the vault, the smoke of which escaped and was lost through that natural issue, transformed into a chimney.

  While some of their companions occupied themselves in this way with sanitizing the air and warming the glacial walls of the underground dwelling, other women made up beds of moss for the children in the cavities, attached nets and other fishing implements, animal skins of every species, and large wicker baskets to the wall, which they pieces with pointed bones. Afterwards, they all sat down in a circle around the fire, and by the bright but vacillating light they set about giving a further preparation to the skins of the bears and cubs killed the previous day. They carried out this work with extreme skill, making use of flint scrapers of all the sizes and shapes most appropriate to their various purposes. They removed all the pieces of flesh that they found attached to the inside of the skins, thus diminishing their thickness. They then soaked them in molten grease, rubbed them between their hands, twisted them, beat them with heavy stones like washerwomen beating soapy linen, and ended up, by dint of perseverance, rendering them extremely supple.